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Risks and Roles of Children in SRM
Children in most African families face multiple risks, and some of them
derive from the very risk management strategies that the child's household
uses.
The risks: OVC are more likely than non-OVC
to experience:
- Infant, child
and adolescent mortality;
- Insufficient
access to nutrition, preventive health services, health care, clothing,
and psychosocial support;
- Low school enrollment
rates (young girls are particularly at risk), high repetition rates,
poor school performance and/or high drop out rates;
- Intra-household
neglect vis-à-vis other children in the household (reduced
access to attention, food and care);
- Family and community
abuse and mistreatment (harassment and violence);
- Economic and
sexual exploitation;
- Burden of heading
a household;
- Lack of parental
care;
- (further) Impoverishment
due to loss of inheritance.
Some of the strategies
used by households to prevent, mitigate or cope with shocks rely on
children. Some of these strategies may be effective for the household
as a whole, but increase the level of risk of (certain) children within
the household. Some real life examples illustrate this point:
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The family chooses
to have many children because children are considered a source of
wealth, and the successful and strong ones will serve as the parents'
old age insurance;
-
The family diversifies
its joint portfolio by selecting different education patterns for the
children, some going to school, others into apprenticeship and others
to work in the fields;
-
The family chooses
to marry off a child to a family of strategic importance (richer,
influential or with complementary networks and skills), regardless
of the child's will;
-
A family chooses
to "place" or entrust a child to another household
in an effort to strengthen or broaden social networks (e.g., a better
off family, or socially important people such as Marabous, or people
in the city);
-
A family is forced
to "place" a child as a means to cope with a crisis, and
the child becomes a domestic servant;
-
A newly remarried
woman expels her child from a previous marriage from the household
as a way to secure her husband's full devotion to the new family;
-
In case of food
shortages, the family decides to cut food to a disabled child because
of his/her lesser value to the household;
-
A disabled child
becomes a serious income source for the family because of its attractiveness
as a beggar
In times of crisis,
households may actively choose to dis-save children's human capital
by giving children less food or food with poor nutritional value, migrating
and leaving the children to grow up with little care and supervision,
taking children out of school, exploiting child labor (for instance
through family controlled child prostitution).
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